September 18-24, 2003

cover story

Those Were The Days

A yearbook found on a Center City curb tells the tale of Roxborough High's Class of '61. Now 60, the graduates pick up the story where the book left off.

by Trish Boppert

We wouldn’t be bedeviled by those annoying Classmates.com pop-up ads if we never wondered, however fleetingly, what became of our high-school classmates. There’s something about the photos in those ads that sucks us in. They make us ponder what might have become of that goofy kid with the electroshock hair who sat across the aisle in biology.

Yes, photos of high-school seniors resonate with a bittersweet poignancy. Their faces shine with giddy promise and, in some cases, dreaded teenage acne. They exude the boundless, joyful certainty that only good things lie in wait. Their future's so bright, they've gotta wear shades. They've got the rest of their lives to wrestle with reality, and who's got the heart to tell them that it's probably gonna kick MTV's Real World butt (not to mention their own) to the curb a couple times before their first high-school reunion?

If you ask them what they expect to be doing when they're closing in on 60, they'll laugh out loud. Sixty? You may as well ask them when they plan to colonize Mars. At age 17 or 18, 35 is ancient, and anything older beyond comprehension. But when 60 is no longer an abstraction, that dewy-eyed dreamer in the cap and gown appears almost unrecognizable, a tantalizingly familiar stranger.

So say some of the members of the Roxborough High School class of 1961, anyway. After they stopped laughing at the notion of being the subject of a newspaper article in the first place. "Are you sure this isn't a joke?" asked one. "Why in the world would you want to write about us?"

Blame it on their high-school yearbook, trash-picked from a Center City curb. It’s a perfectly preserved time capsule of a year defined, in part, by JFK’s Camelot on the Potomac, Freedom Riders, the first American in space, the Bay of Pigs and the birth of the Berlin Wall, the Peace Corps and Ray Kroc’s hamburger empire. Not to mention some 16,000 U.S. advisers sent to Vietnam that long ago November.

Blame it as well on the 1960s themselves -- a decade that has served as a scapegoat for everything from the rise of the welfare state (can you say "Great Society," boys and girls?) to the breakdown of the family (how about "D-I-V-O-R-C-E?"), AIDS ("free love" gone bad), affirmative action (the civil rights movement) to Hillary Clinton ("feminism": Like, wow, man, what a concept).

Though still young men and women at the height of that decade, many from this class say they viewed the decade from a decidedly 1950s perspective. The hairstyles, clothes and captions beneath each graduate's image speak more to Happy Days than to Haight-Ashbury. Female goals include becoming telephone operators, teachers, hairdressers, bookkeepers, CPAs, nurses, journalists and secretaries -- heavy on the secretaries. But topping the list were responses like "becoming happily married to that certain guy," "raising football players and cheerleaders" or otherwise engaging in the state of matrimony.

It's a wider world for the boys, whose goals include joining the service, studying electronics, earning a law degree, "becoming the president of a large firm" and "succeeding at everything." It was a man's world and these grads couldn't imagine it any other way.

REUNITED: (l-r) Andrew Gardner, Dr. Curt Leech and John Leach catch up at a high school reunion. Beneath them are their yearbook shots, like those of their classmates on the next page.

"If you asked me back in high school where I'd be when I was 60, I'd probably have said I'd be married, with a bunch of kids, and would either never have worked or worked just to keep myself busy," says Pat Dugan (nee Percy). "We couldn't imagine having a career, because, you know, we'd get married and be taken care of for the rest of our lives."

Though Dugan never left Roxborough, she's come a long way, baby. A nurse who works with neonatal intensive-care patients, she says that though she wasn't exactly burning her bra as a young mom and housewife, the women's movement of the '60s played a role in her personal and professional development.

"At the time the feminist movement started I was still a housewife, and very much under my husband's thumb, but in retrospect, I think that the women's movement gave me a sense of permission to break out of that mold," she reports.

Sophie (Day) Delaney concurs with the Technicolor’50s daydream proffered to girls back in the day. "I think we really kind of modeled ourselves in the Ozzie and Harriet, white-picket-fence mode. Back then, men ruled the world and they were going to be the providers, while women were still coming off the grand old’50s," she recalls.

It was an ideal held by many young women of their generation, says David Karen, associate professor of sociology at Bryn Mawr College.

"Male/female roles were very rigidly prescribed in 1961. There were very few options for the girls. If they were going to have any kind of career, it was more than likely going to be in teaching or nursing," Karen comments.

But what's striking is that some Roxborough coeds did carve careers outside that norm fairly early on. Take Judy (Clapper) Palestini, voted "best dressed" in the class. Six months after graduating, she was public relations and fashion coordinator at Snellenberg's Department Store and later held regional managerial positions at Macy's and Neiman Marcus. Today, she runs her own promotional company.

Or "most intelligent" Carol Dondrea, who launched an editing career in San Francisco in 1968. "In those days, female college graduates didn't go directly into their professions, with the exception of nursing and teaching, but started as secretaries. As to moving directly into a business career -- forget it. It wasn't done if you were a woman," she recalls.

Yet change was in the air, says "class cutest" Francine (Furcola) Viti, who married classmate John Viti.

"One of our teachers expressed real surprise that not one of the girls from our high-school class was engaged when we graduated, and I think that might have been a turning point," she says. "Before us, several girls probably would have been engaged by graduation, probably to members of their class, and would have married immediately after."

A school administrator, Viti will celebrate her 40th wedding anniversary next year. "People were in [marriage] more for the long haul then, I think, " she says.

In the early’60s, approximately 56 percent of male high-school grads went to college, compared to about 41 percent of females. But even if they were bound for college, many females had more than studying on their minds -- like finding a suitable husband.

"In some ways it was perceived as an opportunity for these young women to meet men who were going somewhere," Karen says.

Eighty class members completed questionnaires for their 10-year reunion. Event organizers crunched the numbers, reported in a commemorative pamphlet. Sixty percent reported some form of higher education; 89 percent were married for an average of 5.6 years, with an average of two children.

Fields of occupation included business, finance, skilled trades, medicine and related fields, computer technology, finance, ministry, homemaking, nursing and teaching.

By 1971, half of the men who attended their first reunion had served in the armed forces.

Regardless of whether they were drafted, served combat duty or didn't serve at all, the war marked a distinct turning point in the lives of many, and to varying degrees, continues to cast its shadow.

Tom Steel, voted "most musical" and described as an outstanding varsity football player, was one who served.

"When I think of Roxborough in 1961," he says, "I remember a very proud, ethnic, predominantly Polish community. There was an innocence, and everything was fresh and new."

He attended Pennsylvania Military College (now Widener University) on a football scholarship and graduated in 1965. "I kind of went into a mode of realism about the draft," Steel says. "I figure I'm gonna go, so I may as well join the ROTC and get a commission, go in as an officer and gentlemen. I figured my country had to be right, and I'd do my duty." Attached to the 101st Airborne, he was posted to Tuy Hoa.

"I was a company commander at age 22," he says, "and every kid in our company was 19."

When asked what the experience was like, Steel says simply, "We served duty. Vietnam vets call each other åbrother.' Maybe that can begin to describe it.

"The last three months over there, I started wondering," Steel recalls. "I was questioning, åIs this right?' And then you come home, and it hits you like a ton of bricks. I kept a little notebook then, and I remember I titled it åFrom the Real to the Ridiculous.' You come back so confused. You're not greeted with a homecoming, so you just don't talk about it."

"Back then," says Arthur Slook, also an RHS football player, "you got out of school and you got some kind of a job, and you kept in touch with your high-school buddies, and then, Vietnam came along and that split everything up. Guys you knew went, and maybe they came back, and maybe they didn't."

A retired Philadelphia police officer, Slook was already on the force and married when he was drafted in 1968. Because of his law enforcement experience, he was posted to Fort Leavenworth.

"I felt guilt about not going to Vietnam," he says, "though at the time I felt a lot of relief. At one point they were going to take 300 guys, and I was one of them, on the second list of 150. For whatever reason, they took the first 150, but not the second, and that was it. I remember a Roxborough guy coming through Leavenworth, and he lasted six months over there before he was killed. It's funny, but I still carry that sense of guilt, all these years later."

John Leach, who ran track at RHS, spent a year in Vietnam as an air traffic controller who landed helicopters. "Class character" John Schwyter, married and a father, was exempted from service.

"To be honest, I've felt a lot of guilt about not having to go over the years. I knew guys who died over there. A friend who played trombone in the high-school band didn't make it home," he says.

"I guess I lucked out by not having to serve over there," says Andy Gardner, an irrepressible RHS booster who helped organize two class reunions. Gardner, who'd applied for a hardship deferment following his dad's death, was classified eligible for the draft in 1968. He signed on with the Army Reserves, but was never drafted. "I didn't do the long hair, demonstration thing, but I just didn't believe in that war and I acted on my convictions in my own way," he says.

Curtis Leech, psychology department chair at Anderson University, rode out the war years in Canada, where he was earning his doctorate at the University of Waterloo, not dodging the draft. He describes Roxborough then as "primarily a blue-collar neighborhood that in a sense exemplified the 1950s dream. We had nuclear families, divorce was uncommon and the country was in love with its young president."

Says Slook, "It was like an American Graffiti existence."

"We weren't at war yet, the issues like drugs and race hadn't occurred," recalls classmate Sophie Delaney, "and the Hot Shoppe was the biggest thing in our lives."

Though innocence was the operative term for their age, the class of ’61 obviously faced some weighty issues early on.

Of the 191 graduates pictured in the yearbook, nine are African American. While it was not possible to locate any of those students for this article, white students recall a friendly and respectful -- albeit in many ways rigidly defined -- relationship with their classmates of color.

"There was a certain separateness. You didn't socialize with black students. I'd been friends with a black classmate since kindergarten, and that was unusual," says Pat Dugan.

Those interviewed also say sex loomed large, as it always seems to. It was not taken lightly in 1961, say those interviewed, because in the absence of reliable information and birth control, consequences could be devastating.

"In those days, you didn't know a damn thing about sex and a lot of kids did stupid things as a result. There were rules, but if you were a girl, and broke them and got caught, you disappeared," Dugan says. "There was no such thing as a girl coming to school pregnant. Some got married immediately, but the majority just disappeared."

The men reported that sex actually meant something more then than they suspect it might for today's teens. It was a challenge, they say, made special by the emotional investment it generally took to get there.

"There were rules," says Steel. "You'd ask a girl out, you'd pick her up and meet her parents and then off you'd go. The big thing was a kiss, and the amazing thing was a hickey. Casual sex did not exist. It was that much more meaningful and serious if it actually did happen."

By the mid- to late '60s, many interviewed report feeling as if someone had changed the rules on their generation without explaining how the new ones worked.

"During the 1960s, the major cultural conflict really does fall between generations, and many of these students may well have fallen on the other, older side of åpeace, love, drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll' so strongly associated with the '60s," Karen notes.

It's just that sense -- of watching that iconic freight train that became known as "the '60s" gather steam and thunder past them -- that some reference when they look back. Dugan reports that though she opposed the war, she would never have openly expressed it while busy perfecting the role of "perfect wife and housewife."

"The temptations like drugs and a freer lifestyle were there, and you noticed them," recalls Schwyter, married and a father by the late '60s. "How could you not?"

Fast-forward 42 years to the Roxborough High School class of 2003. A lot has changed since 1961. The school now draws students from all over the city. The student body is about 80 percent African American and 20 percent "other," defined by students as mostly white. But some things about high school never change, including the buoyant promise shining from the faces of graduating seniors.

Meet Syreeta Hill, James Morse and Terrance Ford. When interviewed for this article at the end of the last school year, they were engrossed in the just-off-the-presses yearbook they helped design.

After pausing to ponder the almost incomprehensible notion, these high achievers say they know exactly where they'll be when they're 60.

"I'll be at the height of my career, an old lady actress playing somebody's grandmother," says Hill, now studying theater and speech communications at Kutztown University. Ford, who's studying biology at Boston College, expects to have his own medical practice when he hits the big 6-0. And Morse, who entered the first coed class at Chestnut Hill College as an elementary education major, is a family man in the making if ever there was one.

"I'll likely be retired, have grandkids, be going on trips, and riding SEPTA for free," he predicts.

Sex for this generation is casual, they say, and issues like race and sexual orientation are essentially non-issues, at least within the school environment.

"The whole casual sex thing you see on TV and such is so common today," Hill says. "As to drugs, I'd say that some students definitely get high and drink, but if you hear of someone doing crack or ecstasy, you really look down on them."

"As African Americans, we are the majority here, and the race issue is not really a big deal," says Morse, while Hill notes that in general, "white students are more trying to act black these days than the other way around and black students are true friends with white students and vice versa."

"In a way," says Ford, "our generation has even changed the word ånigger' by spelling it a different way, and using it a different way to take the negativity out of it. There are openly gay students in the school, and it's not a big deal."

"All in all, my experience at Roxborough High School has been superlative," says Morse, as his friends nod in agreement. It's a sentiment that would resonate with the class of 1961. There was something special about their beginnings, they say, that continues to carry them throughout the years.

"I'll never forget my roots," says Tom Steel, "and that's saying a lot about that particular time and place."

Like the long ago class of 1961, Morse, Hill and Ford are infused with that dizzying, hope-filled certainty. Life, in all it's roller-coaster, messy, mind-numbing, poignant, terrible and beautiful permutations, awaits -- though that's not the way they see it, and why should they?

Their futures are so bright, they're already wearing shades.